Dozens of Peel Regional Police officers scoured a Mississauga park for body parts Thursday after the discovery of a woman’s severed right foot and head.

Officers used old hockey sticks with the blades cut off to sift through tall grass and bushes after the gruesome discovery at Hewick Meadows Park, near Mississauga Rd. and Eglinton Ave. W.

Ontario Provincial Police helicopters were dispatched, in addition to the marine unit. Cadaver dogs were on hand to search the river and surrounding parkland.

A half-dozen police cruisers blocked the entrance to the normally busy park while the search was underway. Called off Thursday evening, the search was expected to resume early Friday.

“We’ll be looking for the entire victim,” acting Insp. Randy Cowan said during the search.

Hikers found the right foot, severed at the ankle, floating near the bank of the Credit River south of Eglinton Ave. W. on Wednesday. Judging from its condition, it’s likely the foot was detached “fairly recently,” Cowan said.

The head was found on the bank of the river by police searchers around noon Thursday, about a kilometre north of where the foot was recovered.

The size of the remains suggest the victim was an adult, Cowan said.

DNA tests are underway to match the body parts. But “common sense tells us this is most likely related,” he said. “Without a cause of death we can’t call it homicide, but certainly foul play — there’s definitely something amiss.”

Police concluded the foot was a woman’s because the toenails were brightly coloured with yellow nail polish.

“It’s certainly disturbing,” Cowan said.

Police climbed over a wrought-iron fence one by one at nearby Croatian Parish Recreational Park Thursday afternoon, feeling around the grass with the hockey sticks. They also searched the side of the road, poking at ground between the guardrail and park fence.

At an overpass overlooking Hewick Meadows Park, kids on bikes and mothers walking with children stopped to see what all the commotion was about.

Grace Hong gasped when she heard about the body parts. She walks alone in the park often.

“That’s why I’m a little bit scared,” she said, adding she won’t be visiting the park for a while.

Police can’t say yet if the body parts were placed at the banks or transported by water from some other point on the river, which flows from headwaters above the Niagara Escarpment to Lake Ontario.

Police are seeking anyone who witnessed something suspicious within the past couple of weeks and urged people to call police if they find something out of place while walking in the area.

Officers are also sifting through missing person’s reports, to see if there’s a link, Cowan said.

“Typically in the region, there are always a number of outstanding missing people,” he said. “The majority of those return safely ... We are going through those reports right now, reaching out to family members.”

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